


Love Letters

by uninvitedtrashcan



Category: Suspiria (2019)
Genre: F/F, Non-Chronological
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-01-26 11:51:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21373699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uninvitedtrashcan/pseuds/uninvitedtrashcan
Summary: 'She has been waiting for so long now.'__________________Letters, written with bodies.
Relationships: Susie Bannion/Madame Blanc
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24





	1. Envelope I

**Author's Note:**

> fresh from the movie so still fumbling this out. may get rearranged once I have done more.

The Eyes Letters.

‘You are always looking at her. You look at her too much. It is dangerous to look at people in such fashion. Something terrible may happen.’ 

-** Oscar Wilde, Salomé**


	2. I

Susanna

∎****

I am looking at her. She is looking at me. We are looking, together. 

Opposite ends of the table. Girls, and Women; Dancers, and Teachers; all gathered round to pay homage, laughing and singing and touching one another with seeking, curious hands. ****

My hair heavy, cut now as it is about the shoulders. (I am not angry at this. I am angry that she did not do it; she is better than such cowardice. But she does not wish to ask.) She is looking at me. I am looking at her. I feel it through the fabric of my dress, novel, resting there against my breastbone. New sensations. There is a draft from the opening door (more women bodies pouring in from the cold, seeking booze and comfort and a sense of home in one another), the grand sweep of winter’s night rushing dark at me, rushing dark through me, hair lifting and falling and I can feel her eyes as she sees this, pays witness to this new way my body moves. ****

“Let me show you,” I tell her. 

“I can see you from here.” 

I have to smile at that, though my lips are still. I linger elsewhere. _The dance school is suspended before me, inert without bodies and sighs and blood to inhabit it._

“More.” ****

Her wordless consent is traced only in the most delicate shift in gravity, a leaning in towards her, a rushing into an opening. I grip the table and go. ****

_Deep winter has the Tanz metallic, burning cold as I kick off my shoes at the door and step in, making room for her to follow._ We are looking at one another._ I do not turn to watch her, to see her, but rather feel her in her gaze across my back as I untie the neck of my dress and let it slide from my shoulders._ They are singing about us, cacophonous, dissonant and wine-wet hysterical. _I feel those pale fire eyes mark the indent of my spine, circling the tailbone as I tug the fabric from my hips. I step out of the dress. _****

Someone spills wine on another. I couldn’t flinch even if I wanted to. (I do not. I do not want to move without her.)****

_I take the stairs in my undergarments alone. The cold has my skin pricked, hairs expansive from my forearms, a hundred dozen miniature antennae. Insect like. Pre-_Langue_. Instinctual._ I wonder if they can feel it, a black magnetism that knows something in each one of their stomachs, right at the pit, that resonates through all of them in sighs, in tears (in darkness). _I write my love letter as I cross the floor, arms sweeping up to toss my hair behind me, casting the straps of my bra down with them. I write my inward-facing blazons as I pull off the last of my clothing and kneel there in the foyer, my back to her. _****

She has been waiting for so long now. Like white winter, once-trodden, she sits/_stands_ frozen. Fear is the wrong word. I feel her distance not as terror. It’s not quite admiration either.****

Kinship, then. A mirror with the masks cast off. ****

I will ask. 

She must answer. 


	3. II

### Veva 

∎

My sisters touch the more tethered girls like porcelain, like fine porcelain, admiring but chaste in their touching. It wouldn’t do to spoil the appetite, to ruin the surprise. 

I know this even as _I look at her, offering herself up as if on a platter. The walls of the school kneel with her, watching, gazing, the force of their attention spotlighting her like a North Star. The space around us contracts. I am not alone in my vertiginous urge to be closer to her. _

“You’re afraid for me,” she says. I don’t answer. Not all flesh is edible. “Or of me?”

_ I step out of the doorway, onto marble and triangular patterns and lines all leading up to her. _

“Both.”

_ She doesn’t answer aloud. She tips her head left, spilling her hair into curls against the muscles of her shoulder. The curve of her right, neck to shoulder blade, extends its cordial invitation. _Tanner is eyeing me, lips pressed thin in a grimace of disapproval. I think she may be the only one who truly appreciates what is going on, more so than I do. More so than I can. Her distaste sharpens the conversation around the dinner table, voices pitching higher, laughter nervous. 

The chord of tension between us snaps as _ I accept _ . _ I draw closer. _

_ I keep a distance between us that just exceeds the distance of touching, one where even in stretching, she could not pull me towards her. She’s already led me so far. Eyes like hers seek more than easy compliance. _

_ I circle her naked body, shoes discarded so that I stride barefoot across the icy marble. Each lifted foot is a fragment of relief; each set step a masochistic shock to my nervous system. _

_ There’s a pleasure in it. There’s a pleasure in the way she is looking at me. A girl with eyes like gravity. A girl with eyes like swallowing _ . _ I pace in time with their contractions, those eyes exerting will upon time and space (colossal, porous, dissolving) and strength (mine). _

_ Circle, she the centre. One pole standing before her, her front, where we both may watch one another. Red hair no longer long enough to frame breasts; red hair licking up neck and chin so that my gaze is always drawn up, up to her looking. Arms, cast behind her, carrying her weight as she allows herself to spill back into the floor, so indulgent and knowing that I can feel the marble pushing back, silently kicking back, upwards. Breasts, abdomen, hips half-obscured by closed thighs. Knees thrust forward towards me, begging opening. _

_ No, not begging. Anticipating. Her body has already told her what is happening. (what has happened. what will happen. written in circles around the clefts and edges of her ankles.) _

_ Circle, she the centre. The opposite pole, and only I can linger, looking. I am looking at her. I am drinking in her back, glow-pale in the ghost silver night, the waxing moon still sliver enough that the shadows cast by her crevices are near black. I am changing as I witness the slope of her spine, the swell of her behind, pressing down on tucked-under toes. The way her skin feels like fabric at this distance. The way she feels painted, like she’s been worked out of material components all worked together by artistry to become more than a whole. _

_ Circle back, coming to an end. I stand facing her, she facing me, head tilted back now to gaze up at me. Her lips are parted. Her breath is felt in the way it changes the space, warming my bones in that gentle, spacious warmth known well to those sharing in companionship. _The girls have stopped touching one another, the women have stopped touching them. They are having to make space.

Our touching is too big for one room to accommodate. 

_ My fingertips curl; my fingertips cross space and shaking and the danger of her looking and find cheek, jaw, down and pressing firm to caress her face. Sharp, sudden inhale. Urge to flinch back like I’ve been bitten. She’s melting into me and my animal base is compelling me to run for fear of the force of her. I feel her sinkpit. I feel her dark internal space, cavernous, gaping. I feel the way I’m summoned in. _

_ This girl is something else. Something other. Someone Other. And here she is, before me. My Other. At least for a moment. _

_ I lean in, and unfold my self to her. _


	4. III

Susanna + Veva

∎

We fuck in a myriad of reflections. 

Every mirror holds us, has held us, all at a dozen different refracting angles, and every fragment that snatches us together, we touch, we _ feel_. The Tanz is full of them, alive with mirrors, with other-images that we populate with our roiling limbs, our hands coming together. 

(She traces me, older, strained, elegant in that way only those who’ve been drawn through the filtration of time can be. Bitterly European.)

There are two above the restaurant table, carrying us, parallel images of our locked gazes, our straight backs, sloped shoulders. It recalls and predicts so many snapshots, so many frames where we move together in ways light can't see. Those mirrors, their stillness, grow heady with contrast to our pitching hearts.

There in the entrance, the floor is polished near silver, reflecting ghosts back to our pale limbs. We don’t need mirrors to watch ourselves; we see our self echoed in the other. 

(She answers me, younger, loose, volatile, sprawling in that way only the death heat of America can produce in a woman. Flattering and exposing all at once. Uninvited.)

We straddle one another’s hips, kissing, drinking, and flipping over to repeat the inverse. (Symmetry is one of many tools in a dance. It creates an order to be admired. It creates an order to be broken.) We taste like cold, like frost in the most early morning or that peculiar crisp wetness that arises in the space between showers of rainfall. Our internal cores quicken with heat, with movement, but our skins are reptilian to the touch. We shiver. Those watching (unaware) shiver. Our responses to one another are wordless; they are anything but silent. The language is one of fingertips and ratcheting breaths and small, involuntary whimpers brought forth by the other’s fingers.

At last, we’re fucking. 

Hair is caught. Snatched back. That which is rough can be equally loving as the gentle. More so: it is permeated with trust. There is nothing but trust as she (I) shoves me (her) down against the marble. Spine arches away from the shock of cold, chest pressing against chest. We fall back down against the floor together. Our legs entangle, my body up against hers, the first flush of real heat licking up thighs. We look at one another. We look at the eyes of the other. We look into one another. 

This is not what it feels like to fuck a man. The feeling— 

(I was thinking of an animal.)

When I dance, I feel her close to me, radiating up my palms into the fibres of my muscles, firing off with the electrical tides of ions in my body. She’s a steady build, a rush of breath; we grind together and the tension itches up the base of our spinal cord, a knot that lengthens, gripping, biting at vertebrae and clenched fists caught up in hair. It is a fight to keep our eyes open, to _ look_, but we fight instinct and that vertigo gravity to stay with our heads locked, turned into one another, gazing as we jut our animal bodies together. 

(Look at me.)

The fear of falling is perfectly real. There is everything to be afraid of. It’s an inevitable downward pitch into something no longer autonomy. A co-existence, as our flesh rubs and heats together, an alchemy performed in the quick of night. Something forged in the eyes, cemented in the swallowing of breath. 

Only the truly autonomous can live forever. Only the vampire lives on, night after night. Those drained are bestial carcasses, slung up on meat hooks and discarded in the daylight. 

We fuck anyway. We fuck because we have both brushed up against that parasitic existence. We know well its promise, its power. 

(My forehead rests against yours, noses flush, lips sharing breath, gazes held. You flex your spine, hips jutting up against me, and I feel it as a shuddering of warmth, liquid, amniotic, viscous (like blood) washing through me.)

We chose one another. 

  
  
  


  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
